War is Hell. Cannes is
Heaven. 24-hour-a-day moviegoing is Purgatory. (Or
can be). The 2004 Côted’Azur junket
had it all: the good, the bad and the in-between. As Jean-Luc Godard anticipated in his own gift to the 57th
festival, NOTRE MUSIQUE, we in the fifth month of the fourth year of
the third millennium AD are replaying Dante’s Divine Comedy. Or so it
often felt in this sunny southern-French spot, sited between embattled hemi-demi-semispheres (while brightly, rightly insisting that
art must go on as usual) .

The world is not at
war: only bits of it. Yet it sure feels global. At Cannes the
European premiere of TROY seemed effulgently
up-to-the-minute, with its tale of drawn-out strife, bloody, sullied and
fitfully heroic, in a land eastward of the Mediterranean.
Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 was
a blast from the frontline, exploding out from late-late news in Iraq to both
the semi-distant past – the family history of Bush/Bin Laden entente – and
the near future of an impending US
presidential election. And a swift audit of a dozen other movies, from Patricio Guzman’s SALVADOR
ALLENDE to Heinz Weingartner’sTHE EDUKATORS (first German film in
the Cannes competition for eleven years) to Emir Kusturica’sLIFE IS A MIRACLE to ApichatpongWeerasethakul’sTROPICAL MALADY (first Thai film in
competition ever), proves that the entire world is obsessed with conflict.
From the crimson skyline of the rising sun to the blood-dipped horizons of
the west.

Godard will
win no new converts with NOTRE MUSIQUE.
The film is about as coherent as a crackling last message left on a field
telephone by a war-crazed soldier. But that may be why it feels so
brilliantly a propos.

First we get the
opening battle montage, a long uncommentated
delirium of clips from war footage actual and fictional (from Holocaust to Hollywood). Then
the pic composes itself – sort of – into a set of
passing exchanges between philosophical voyageurs
sans bagages. Theyinclude Jean-Luc himself, looking a little older, a little
greyer, a little more mischievously vatic. And they try to solve the problems
of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, of
Marxism and Capitalism, of peace and war....

You get the
picture. And even if you don’t, the picture gets you. Godard
has never got old. It’s just we who have regressed to infancy. With our need
for simple stories, for bread-and-circus narratives in the Spielbergo-Cameronian age, we are forgetting the lessons
the old New Wave taught us: that a tale told the ‘wrong way round’, with its
ideas determining its plot structure instead of vice versa, can teach us more
than ABC what-nextery.

Thailand’s
fascinating TROPICAL MALADY is no
easier on the braincells. The gay romance depicted
between a soldier and a country boy is already prone to structural hiccups in
the first half. Song interludes; a wordless sequence of a boy – the boy? – walking naked through
forests.Then midway, reality
surrenders to fable. Unconditionally. In a series of word-captioned tableaux vivants,
like picture-book pages gone filmic, Character A (the soldier) is
reincarnated as a camouflaged Everyman hunting a mysterious prey, who appears
to be Character B (as naked boy, then as tiger) through the midnight thickets
of a jungle. Is the prey, the monster, actually himself? Are we all seeking
to devour the objects of our desire, after filling them with our own memory
systems and identities? (Is that what war is about as well as love?)

And did someone say
Dante?“Halfway through life I found
myself in a dark forest”. Of course Cannes isn’t a
dark forest. It’s more a tourist hot spot filled with champagne light where
happy, crazy people try to set the world to rights by making and seeing
movies.Et in Arcadia ego. And to Latinise further – with thanks to Virgil – Armani virumquecano. Dressed in the best from Emporio
Giorgio, the suit-wearer’s passport to a world united, I strode happily into
battle. (And indeed into restaurants. It’s amazing what being dressed by
Armani can do for your unofficial credit rating in European eateries).

War and art. Art
and war. Among the films addressing conflict topics, directly or obliquely,
many fearlessly raised the banner with the bold device “Art is Bliss”. Kusturica’s latest flick orders you to be optimistic with
its very title. LIFE IS A MIRACLE.
Even in war-battered Bosnia, a
villager can fall in love with the in-house girl hostage he’s supposed to
surrender in exchange for his son. And even around this troubled oasis of
passion, a happier corona of activity can fizz into being, in shape of funny
animals (including a lovelorn donkey) and crazy musical groups (the
director’s own No Smoking Band) and lots of perpetuum mobile comic life suggesting that this village’s patron saint is
St Vitus.

The Serbian
two-time Golden Palm winner was reproved by some for filtering a cruel war
through a rosy viewfinder. But outlaw optimism and what else do we have to
live for? The French loved the movie. It probably reminded them, with its
garish colours, escapist expressionism and sky-navigating flying reveries, of
Chagall. Kusturica, at best, always does.

Art is bliss? Well,
it is, isn’t it? Especially great art, a peak that one filmmaker at Cannes is now
fast approaching. China’s Wong Kar-Wai makes movies
on the usual subjects: war and peace, love and hate, humanity and inhumanity.
But 2046, his 4-years-in-the-making latest, has the cosmic, godly view that
separates immortal cinema from mortal. What’s the difference? Well: Kusturica shows people flying, Wong Kar-Wai
actually flies.

For ten minutes,
admittedly, we wonder if we’re still stuck in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE. That was Wonky’s
last Cannespreemer. Here is Tony Leung again, Chinafilm’s
Mr Charisma, glad-eyeing a sequence of swoonily lit
women in a hotel timewarped, seemingly, in the
Technicolor 50s.(The story
theoretically unfolds in late-60s Singapore and Hong
Kong). Leung looks more like Clark Gable than ever:
handsome cowlick, ladykill moustache, puckered
smile blending wry gallantry with rueful melancholy. But the films is more
than a multi-storey romance stopping at different floors as Leung puts the
moves on lovelorn courtesan Zhang Ziyi and aging
but glamorous casino groupie Gong Li, in between counselling landlord’s
daughter Faye Wong in the conundrums of love. Leung plays a writer doodling a
sci-fi story – conjured in digital vignettes – about a train that travels to
year 2046 where humans can recapture their lost memories. No one can escape.
Or none but one. That’s the hero-writer himself: determined to free his
time-locked happiness, imprisoned in the memory of a long-ago love, in a
hotel room hapfully numbered 2046, a love that
sealed off his heart ‘forever’, if he’s unlucky, from other passions....

So it’s just a
tragic love story, you’ll say. Puccini plus Sternberg. WATERLOO ROAD meets LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN. If not,
what else is it about?

For starters it’s
about Christopher Doyle’s cinematography. Wong’s lenser
has his finest hour (two hours). The imagery is jawdropping.
Doyle sluices colour, radiance and iridesence
through the handful of sets; he bestows chameleon hues, sheens and textures
on ‘plain’ rooming-house walls; he half-curtains the widescreen opulence of
some shots in black; he refracts and facets others in such a way that we seem
to be peering through jewelled eye-glasses.

And what’s it all
for? It’s for conveying the heart and mind of a man trapped in his own hall
of reflections. His own memory maze. Where romance and beauty are doomed to
be referential, to gaze out only in duplicated lustre while real love exists
as the never-seen but always-remembered....

Music in this movie
goes with the mood and message: a plush and plangent super-kitsch, echoes of
nostalgic echoes – from Callas crooning ‘Casta Diva’ to Como drooling ‘Chestnuts Roasting on a Open Fire’ –
while exotic distanciation is further imposed by
the captions that formally interrupt the narrative, as if they are quotes
from the hero’s phantom novel. (“He began to sense a horror in the
affair....”).

This is what great
cinema is about. A story comprehensible predominantly in its imagery; where
words and sounds are footnotes and haunting echoes, auxiliary but secondary;
where the invited filmgoer prises open the door to a new world, recognizable
yet different, like the mysterious shape, seen at beginning and end, that
guards the portals of this tale. Is it a giant shell? Is it a jewelled
oyster? Is that an eye in its centre? When a love story, in its infinite
verticality, meets a science fiction story, with its infinite horizontal
reach rearward and forward, anything is possible. Which is probably why Wong Kar-Wai picked this collision of genres.

It won My Private
Bundle of Gold award and should surely have won the Golden Palm. Years ago
Quentin Tarantino, who had just started out as the wild man of Wonderland,
California, helped to release the very movie that made Wonky’s
name. CHUNGKING EXPRESS. Just shows: a
great pulp-fictioner could pick ‘em, though for some reason he didn’t pick this one.

Elsewhere, Tarantino
put himself about to good effect. Not a man to sequester himself in
smoke-filled rooms – unless it’s gunsmoke and he’s
clearing up dead bodies – Quent went everywhere. To
the thrill of gossip hacks ogling a new romantic ‘item’, Sofia Coppola was
often at his side, not least at the Z
CHANNEL showing. How she and he and we in the audience giggled to watch
QT go ape on screen. He was one of XanCassavetes’s interviewees in this Sundance-hailed docu-hit about a cine-seer, suicide and legendary cable
channel programmer.

Tarantino at this
fest was grace itself. He suffered the shutterbugs to come unto him. He gave
the press corps an easier time than they could remember with any previous Palmed’Or
pontiff. He sat in on KILL BILL 2
the Euro-premiere and later THE
COMPLETE KILL BILL (240 mins). And he sat back
for two days while another Ugly American became news all over the Croisette,
indeed the populated world. Michael Moore.

FAHRENHEIT 9/11, Moore’s
avidly awaited exercise in Bush-whacking, filled so many screening-rooms to
bursting, in the main festival building, that people were all but falling out
through ventilation grilles. (There are no windows in the ‘Bunker’s
hinterland). If they had, after a white-knuckle trip through serpentiningairducts, they would
have fallen into another auditorium showing the same movie.

There were as many
vertical levels of simultaneous FAHRENHEIT
9/11 screenings as there were serial vertical levels in ancient Troy(coming up next). The movie too is
multi-level. Moore’s 2-hour
jeremiad against the White House’s Iraq
adventurer smokes, hisses and crackles after its initial explosion has done
its work. The first hour is brilliant docu-terrorism.
It sets its blasts under the Bush/Bin Laden fiscal and familial links. It
wires a satirical detonator to Bush’s floundering public appearances, not
least his paralysed facial and body language at the primary school where he
heard the 9/11 news. (“Mr Bush just sat there reading MY PET GOAT....”. Quite a challenging read for him!).

If the Moore mastery
weakens a little in the second half, it’s because a misbegotten war is its
own harshest critic. What could the filmmaker add to the daily news bulletins
from Bahgdad or Falluja –
fresh each morning with our French croissants – which upstaged anything a
hellfire political counter-preacher could do with tape, editing scissors and
voice-over verbal poundings? Quite a bit, actually, given this man’s
determined inventiveness. And hooray, the movie got the 2004 Golden Palm,
only the second documentary to do so in Cannes
history, the first being Jacques Cousteau’s THE SILENT WORLD (1956).

Moore of
course was mobbed. It’s a weird world, but lovable, when an unshaven fatso in
baseball cap, sports shirt and shin-length khaki short gets stormed by more fans,
on a midnight Croisette
stroll, than gather screaming by the Palais steps
for such as Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Julie Andrews (all SHREK 2), CharlizeTheron (THE
LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS), Tom Hanks (THE LADYKILLERS) or Brad Pitt.

Well, exempt Brad.
He did cause hysteria. Not just at the tapis rouge but at the TROY press
conference. The hysteria was international. “Question for Brad,” “Question pour Monsieur Pitt,” “I woo’
like to haskSenyorPeettheese question”, “Ah so, Bradpitt-san!, I have question as follows....”

Wolfgang Petersen,
Eric Bana and Brian Cox, also attending, might as
well have been smiling waxworks. Brad flashed blue eyes, dimpled his cheeks
with each smile, scratched his stubble-blond hair, showed his extensive
knowledge of anthropology, archaeology and geography – “Troy is in Turkey”
(to someone asking if it was in Albania) – and confirmed the screenwriter’s
assertion that there is no mention in Homer that Patroclus,
Achilles’s ‘cousin’ in the movie, was Achilles’ gay
lover. In short Pitt turned everyone in the room into snowmelt, even those
who had arrived with a deep-frozen contempt for TROY.
(Still, Patroclusis Achilles’s lover).

Whaddyado? Some
folk just have the magic. Here’s another: Gael Garcia Bernal. The Mexican hearththrob, starring in two Cannescrowdpullers, Pedro Almódovar’sBAD EDUCATION and Walter Salles’sMOTORCYCLE
DIARIES, had been on my flight to Nice. This alone was enough to get me
invited to eighteen dinners thrown by wealthy Cote d’Azur matrons.
“And what was Gael like...?”, “Did you sit near him...?” “Are his eyes a
melting shade of brownish-blue...?” “Is Troy in Albania...?”
(sorry, wrong dinner).

These two pix prove
that the Force is with Latin cinema as we move towards 2005. In the Pedro pic, Gael plays the cross-dressing brother of a transexual ex-child-abuse victim who (Gael, that is) gets
amorously involved with both the brother’s former schoolhood
lover and the formerly abusing priest-teacher. On another narrative level
(there are as many as Troy) a movie-within-the-movie, or rather a
movie-encircling-the-movie, is turning all this into high-style screen
melodrama as we watch.

Wild or what? For Almódovar it’s show business as usual. So is his ability
to paint a swimming pool as if it were a Hockney masterpiece, to texture sets
for emotional meaning and symbolic enrichment (dig the crazy-tiled look of a
crazy-tiled character’s Madrid mews pad) and to strip his characters both
literally and metaphorically when the narrative heat turns up.

In MOTORCYCLE DIARIES Gael Garcia Bernal
plays Ernesto Guevara in 1952, before the 23-year-old Argentinian
medical student won his nickname ‘Che.’ (And
several years before he met Fidel, changed Caribbean history
and became a T-shirt). He and a pal tour South America on a
truth-based field trip to investigate diseases continent-wide, including
leprosy.As one does.

They rev, roar,
sputter, push and finally walk – every motorbike has its last day – all the
way to Colombia, after Salles has toured them through scenery to die for in Chile and Peru. The
visual climax is the famous Mayan plateau surrounded by supercrags
where Aztec panpipes on the soundtrack, as if under the distant telepathic
influence of Tony Bennett, seemed to be whiffling
“I lost my heart, in MacchuPicchu...”.
The political subtext of Salles’s film is clumsily
served up. Guevara meets a succession of dispossessed peasants and peons, all
but carrying placards saying “We are the poor and persecuted and you are the
future guerrilla messiah of Latin America.” But
the landscapes are beautiful. So is the acting.

Real-life
characters are great to meet at a filmfest, whether impersonated on screen or
immanent in the flesh. How numinous to meet Max Von Sydow.
Here in Cannes to give an acting masterclass, the avatar of Ingmar Bergman,
the ‘Exorcist’, the Christ 40 years before Mel Gibson, and the man who made
three days of the condor seem 362 days too few – that was a thriller one
could have watched for a continuous year – spoke from his spiritual diaphragm.

In that deep voice
made of melted chocolate and broken glass he presented an hour of insights.
Into the how, why, wherefore of the thesping art,
from the profound to the pragmatic. The key to any character, he said – at
any point in any play or movie – was to know what he wanted.“’I want, I want,
I want’ should be the actor’s mantra,” rasped the mage. “The drama is the
drama of conflicting needs and desires.”

On the practical
side, always speak a line after you
make your gesture. So (pointing imperiously to the exit sign): “Get the hell
out of here!” cries Sydow. We are momentarily so
alarmed that we almost do. Then Sydow repeats it
the other way round, after a few remarks about the speechmaking ineptitude of
politicians. We suddenly see that if “Get the hell out of here!” is followed by the raised arm and
pointing finger, the gesture is forced and phony.
It seems a posturing afterthought. Light is suddenly shed on the incidence of
the ridiculous in the rhetoric of folks like – well, to name the name again –
George Dubya Bush. (Now I must wash my mouth out
with soap again).

Back in the land of
darkness we call moviegoing, the fest was whirling
to its climax. And just when we had begun thinking that Cannes 2004 was a
little weak on the very art Von Sydow had
apostrophised – acting – a horde of histrionic view-halloos were suddenly
hurled at us from the screen.

·CLEAN. Hong
Kong diva Maggie Cheung, who was Olivier Assayas’s
Irma Vep, plays the heroin-hooked heroine of the
French regisseur’s latest. A popworld
dropout recovering from an OD’d hubby’s death, Cheung’s character tries to
kick the drug habit while auditioning for (a) a job and (b) the return of her
fostered-out son. The little boy’s grandpa-in-law Nick Nolte doesn’t want to
let him go. Cheung, now Europe-based, doesn’t intend to give him up. Heigh-ho, we’re into a moral battle of wills as subtle,
steely and ocean-straddling as a Henry James novel. Will Megs win Cannes Best
Actress? Yup. She will.

·THE LIFE
AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS. Geoffrey Rush ‘is’ the British goon turned
millionaire prey of charlatan clairvoyants, overbearing mothers and serial
wives. Poor Peter Sellers. Once – as this film based on Roger Lewis’s biog
shows – he all but was the Boulting Brothers, Blake Edwards and Stanley Kubrick. They were filmmakers sensible enough to
surrender to this one-man show when he was on song. But ah, it all went
wrong. Cue rage, tears, divorce, bad behaviour, and Brechtian
alienation whoopee (with Rush playing Sellers phantasmically
playing Blake, Stan and Mom). Rush is brilliant. You can’t tell him apart
from either Sellers or Sellers’s creations:
Strangelove, Clouseau, Chauncy
Gardiner. Will he win Cannes Best
Actor? Nope. Sorry.

·THE
LADYKILLERS. Well, as remakes go, it’s not a great comedy. Is
it? Ealing did it better. But Coen see what you
think. Star Tom Hanks was in Cannes, if
they thought of handing out a guerdon to a famous Hollywoodite.
And his quietly, orotundly spoken southern gen’l’man, a criminal mastermind who drawls “This is most
irr-eg-ular” whenever someone is shot, stabbed or
strangled in his presence, surely had a chance at Best Actor? After all, Cannes has
always loved Joel and Ethan’s movies. But no. Not even shy at it. But what do
you know?Irma P. Hall (not to be
confusedwith Irma Vep) did get a Cannes award
for her portrayal of the garrulous black lady in the same film who hosts and
then shops Hanks’s gang! She got a special Jury
Prize for her pains, exaequo with, of
all things, the previously mentioned Thailand movie TROPICAL MALADY. Mostirr-eg-ular, but also most
interesting.

In the event the
Best Actor prize went to 14-year-old YagiraYuuya in Kore-EdaHirokazu’sNOBODY
KNOWS from Japan: a fair
if hardly fireworky performance in this tale of a
mother-abandoned family battling to survive in Tokyo.

The Far
East cleaned up the few column inches any critic had
left. The Grand Jury Prize went to ChanwookPark’s
mad-as-a-hatter OLD BOY from Korea: a
Tarantino verdict if ever there was one. Plot concerns a man who has been
incarcerated by persons unknown for 14 years and comes out to wreak a
terrible revenge. If there is a limb left unlopped
on screen, or a head unhammered, or a brain
undamaged, it was surely an oversight.

I personally left
Cannes after leaping from top to top of the palm trees along the Croisette, distributing my messages of thanks and
felicitation to a well-conducted festival, presided over as ever – for the
appreciative press corps – by the gracious Christine Aimé.

At the city limits
I turned back one last time to the sight of gleaming bay and seafront lined
with colourful festival posters. Making sure my gesture preceded my
utterance, as tutored by Max von Sydow, I waved it
in loving valediction and exclaimed, in the words made immortal by General MacArthur and Governor Schwarzenegger, “Jereviens!”

COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING
INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.